


Do You Hear Our Cries

by orphan_account



Category: Mother 3
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 14:32:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11557182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Deadheading flowers long enough birth them anew while still growing from the same root, and even with the dissociation between himself and the body, Lucas knew his brother was still before him.





	Do You Hear Our Cries

**Author's Note:**

> I'm currently sitting on my shaggy carpet floor in my bedroom at 5 am, hoping to God my father's hateful girlfriend can't tell I'm awake, sitting next to my low window that looks out on miles of woods that have not wake up to the cold sunrise yet.
> 
> I'm very tired, and suffering insomnia. I have a single metal rod sitting next to me that was pulled from a train track, and every time I touch it I get rust on my hands.
> 
> I write from experience, no matter how much I need to bullshit the details.

Thunder breaks between wings that desperately try to outturn, but knowing his skill he takes the bird down in one good go with father’s shotgun. It breaks through the sky and ignites streaks, cracking off electricity as he stares at the burden that lay at his feet. It’s a subtle moment of morbidity that won’t mean much but for now let's him test the waters for an unfamiliar sensation. He gives the bird a proper burial, at least, and covers up the remains that marked where it had fallen.

Death was not a concept that ever got to Claus, like so anybody else; but there was something deep down in both of them that called to the bullet that could take away a supposedly endless rhythmic beat --- the stopping of a drum that, no matter how hard it would be hit, would never produce sound again. It was thrilling music in itself to Claus.

Teetering on comfort and curiosity, he often left to find what was unattainable. Skipping sermons to preach a rebellion of his own, Lucas remembers coming home to find that evil has been given asylum in their house in the form of growing graves plotted in the garden and feathers plucked from the fragile wings of what fed them. Bird flocks had never seem so fleeting to him until that time.

The morbid curiosity that struck him was something he never grew out of. It had no business in Tazmily, so as he grew he concealed it under the mask of maturity -- there was only so long one could choke it down as a ‘phase’.

He never hid it from Lucas either, who, with gradual exposure to the bewildering acts, still didn’t understand but came tolerant to them. 

When the railroads were being set in, disrupting the earth at their feet and breaking the mold of the town, Claus was the first to brave the beast and investigate; Lucas stayed behind, sitting at their porch, watching the light rain clouds rolling in from the distance as he swayed himself for comfort. It was quite a long time that his brother was gone, and every time the machine blew it’s horn, he shuttered.

But he was back by nightfall, and didn’t say a word. Instead, he took one of Lucas’ hands away from his lap and forced his palm open, and dispensed to him a heavy rod, shimmered gold when it caught the light of the cabin.

“ I pulled it from the track.” Was all he said before turning inside.

 

 

They kept it in their sock drawer; tucking it away tightly during the light of day as to not be found, taking it out at night as to wonder at it against lamplight. Claus told Lucas that he pulled it from the tracks, and that there were thousands of them lining it into the dirt.

He watched men pierce these into the ground with great big hammers, striking them so hard that they shake verbatim and clash like lightning does when it strikes through the clouds --- It’s a loud and heavy process, and they work at it like machines, never missing a nail or a beat.

“ They go on for miles,” he says, taking the heavyweight in with both his hands, “ Breaking down the earth with these. I don’t think it’ll ever end.”

 

It was Spring, soon rolling in Summer as the storms begin to roll into Nowhere Islands. 

Claus taught him not to fear the oncoming storms; but knowing his limits, slept next to him with cradled arms and kept him tucked under the blankets.  They were taught very young the good that the storms brought --- water for the plants, electricity for the ground, new beginnings sparked by wildfires that will roll over the dead and allow the living to thrive --- but Lucas still feared them, or moreso the sound of them. Loud noises were never a comfort, which the newly built train was not helping with.

The storm just atop of them, he shook, but knew that Claus was there ready to break to thunder under beaten wings that make the thunder pale under his own beat, something rhythmic like that of a heart. Lightning could fill the air and streamline into the windows shaking up every last bit of his brother, but he knew how to be the stronger one. He feared no strike and never once ran in the opposite direction of a funnel, instead staring up right at the eye as if there was something there staring back at him; he never ran for the cellar door but instead ran to the widest view of the sky broken between the trees.

In these moments the cabin always felt so empty besides the two, as if their parents weren’t sound asleep just above them as the rain marched across their rooftop; it was just them in the house, in the darkness that let claps of lightning streak the interiors and momentarily blind him as he feels his brother laugh over something that doesn’t spawn in the memory.

He’ll never forget those final moments, as if the brain knew of what lied ahead and stored the invaluables deep in his skull until they were needed again, last glimpses of the calm before a storm.

The echoes of his laughter that vibrated in his ribs and bones that produced a rumble more organic than thunder, now replaced under the distinct pain of an engine roaring under taps of metal slates and pipes; a ribcage replaced with a chassis, a spine replaced with a, a brain replaced with a black box. If he ever searched for a pulse upon his body after the deconstruction he was positive he wouldn’t find the offbeat rhythmic drive of his brother’s heart pumping blood --- the pulse that kept calm during the storms --- no, he’d find something foreign whirring in his cavity that heaved his body to life with electricity only.

A bird shot from the sky and carefully put out of it’s mercy, but unlike the empathetic curiosity that bloomed in Claus like the flowers he pressed on the graves, he was not given the same in return; instead they ripped him.open and tore him out, building back a skeleton for his exterior to rely on as the very being he was rot in buckets instead of the welcoming earth. From there he was patched right back up like a re-stuffed ragdoll, the mold of him there but nothing else. It was the cavity of Claus, but someone else had taken over.

Claus was always something more human than the rest to Lucas. He looked into things and kept very little hidden, let his heart feel whatever it felt, and let himself succumb to the organics of the world, the mold of sadness and blooming perennials of happiness --- so to rip that away as if it was all just weeds in the garden, they were idiots.

Deadheading flowers long enough birth them anew while still growing from the same root, and even with the dissociation between himself and the body, Lucas knew his brother was still before him.

He held a part of him too, being blood brothers. He kept the memories and emotions they shared, fragments to use in the rebuilding, never fully the same but those salvaged fragments having to make do with the newer pieces.

It was something short of irreplaceable, and even with those pieces staring at him once everything reset still very much felt like being shot in the side.

It was him, but only on the outside; the interior of his brother that made him so was gone, having rotted away while the steel supports inside him had yet to age. There was nothing left of Claus really, except for his physical body, which even then had to be reconstructed back to how some of it was before --- other than that, it wasn’t really his brother sitting there.

Quiet was the best way to describe it. He had no memories of what had happened ( while Lucas did), had no recollection of what he had done ( while Lucas did), no understanding of how the world came to change so much around him ( while Lucas did). He saw the railroad once when Flint had sent them out to buy some firewood, and they detoured to run along it’s side, Lucas quietly praying something will come to him, an old memory that once shared that now broods only in his mind, but twice as strongly.

 

It was the end of a storm that didn’t know of it’s own damage, pulling away to the horizon and leaving the land it had impacted to the aftermath without care. It will cycle out and the clouds will disperse, reborn almost anew, unable to bring forth the lightning it once never ceased to stop. Lucas was stuck in the aftermath of what Claus will never remember, seeing the damage that runs right under his nose, unable to break the thunder in his heart and managing only faint cracks in the distance.


End file.
